An email I sent to Uber to express my gratitude to an unknown supervisor.
To the unknown executive, thank you.
Kansas City is not my home but it is now MY city. I used to tell people I grew up “around Cincinnati” but “Travis Kelsey’s hometown” works just fine!
Thanks to you, I have become an informal tour guide, a professional driver, hustler, budding statesman, salesman and a proper business owner.
Thank you for the job. I was a pastor for 22 years and married for 24. Life got lifey around 2020, which is when I had a midlife meltdown and lost everything: my job, my credibility and sadly my marriage.
I had contemplated taking my own life off and on in 2021-2022 but I have five kids who need a dad, who also has to steady job to support them in a very insecure season of their life.
I’m gratefully never without work.
Time alone on the road, and also with passengers, has allowed me to do some deep work on the “what the hell just happened to my life” questions I ask myself.
I have a master’s degree and I’m working toward a PhD and have been trying to land a “real job” with benefits for the last 2 years but you have kept me afloat. I will likely keep it as a side hustle until I can’t drive.
I’m not as worried about getting out of the car now as much because it is giving me options for working on the parts of my life that need maximum flexibility of schedule.
Thank you for the rides and also for the riders: perfect strangers who willingly share with me a part of their story, verbally or in silence. There’s not a pub, church, clinic, tattoo parlor, or Ethiopian restaurant I haven’t heard of or checked out for myself. We are a drama unfolding and hearing the pages turn is now becoming a part of my own biography.
A wise man once said, we are who we are as a result of a series of someones, and you have been a profound someone in my own journey.
Sincere and grateful,
Timothy Holman
4.97 rating, 2,785 rides
Tim Holman, Writer 